Frankly I cannot blame Silius for being deceived by her: she deceived me daily for nine years. Remember that she was very beautiful; and you can assume, too, that she had doctored his wine. Naturally he tried to comfort her, and before he realized what was happening, they were lying in each other’s arms on the couch mixing the words ‘love’ and ‘liberty’ with kisses and sighs. She said that only now did she know what true love meant, and he swore that with her help he would restore the Republic at the earliest opportunity, and she swore to remain everlastingly faithful to his love if he divorced his wife, who, she knew, was secretly unfaithful to him, and was barren too – Silius ought not to let his family die out – and so on, and so on. She had hooked him, and now she played him for all her worth.
But Silius was cautious as well as virtuous, and did not feel himself strong enough to raise an armed revolt. He divorced his wife but told Messalina, on second thoughts, that it would be best if they waited for me to die before restoring the Republic. Then he would marry her and adopt Britannicus, and this would make the City and Army look to him as their natural leader. Messalina saw that she would have to take action herself. So she worked the Barbillus trick on me as I have described, and Silius (if what he told me afterwards was the truth) knew nothing of the divorce until she went to him with the document, without explaining how she came by it, and told him joyfully that they could now get married and live happily ever afterwards, but that he must tell nobody about it until she gave him permission.
Everyone at Rome was astounded at the news of Messalina’s divorce, particularly as it seemed to make no difference to me: I continued to show her as much respect as before, or even more, and she continued her political work at the Palace. But every day she visited Silius at his house, quite openly, with a full retinue of attendants. When I suggested that she was carrying the joke rather too far, she told me that she was finding some difficulty in consenting to make him marry her. ‘I’m afraid that he suspects that there’s some catch in it, and he’s very polite and reserved, but underneath he’s boiling with passion for me, the beast!’ After a few days of this she gleefully reported that he had consented and would marry her on the tenth of September. She asked me to officiate as High Pontiff and see the fun. ‘Won’t it be lovely to watch his baffled face when he finds he’s been cheated?’ By this time I had begun to repent of the whole business, especially of this practical joke on Silius, although he had insulted me in the Senate again with another ill-mannered interruption. I decided that I should not have taken the prophecy seriously and that I had only done so because I was half-awake when Messalina told me of it. And if the prophecy was really true, how could it be evaded by a mock-marriage? It occurred to me that no marriage is recognized as such by law until it has been physically consummated. I tried to persuade Messalina to drop the whole business, but she told me that I was jealous of Silius and that she thought that I was losing my sense of humour and becoming a silly old spoil-sport and pedant. I said no more.
On the morning of the fifth of September I went down to Ostia to dedicate a big new granary there. I had told Messalina that I would not be back until the following morning. Messalina said that she wanted to come too, and it was arranged that we would drive down there together; but at the last moment she had one of her famous sick-headaches and had to stay behind. I was disappointed, but it was too late to change my plans, since a civic reception had been arranged for me at Ostia, and I had promised to sacrifice in the Temple of Augustus there: ever since the occasion on which I had lost my temper with the Ostians for not receiving me properly I had been particularly careful not to hurt their feelings.
Early that afternoon as I was going into the Temple to the sacrifice, Euodus, one of my freedmen, handed me a note. It was now Euodus’s duty to protect me from inopportune petitions from the general public: all notes were handed to him, and if he considered them frivolous or insane or not worth my attention I was not bothered with them. It is surprising what reams of nonsense people write in petitions. Euodus said, ‘Excuse me, Caesar, but I can’t read this. A woman handed it to me. Perhaps you can be bothered just this once?’ To my surprise it was written in Etruscan, an extinct language known to not more than four or five living people, and read: ‘Great danger to Rome and yourself. Come to my house at once. Don’t waste a moment.’ It startled and puzzled me. Why Etruscan? Whose house? What danger? And it was a minute or two before I understood. It must be from Calpurnia, the girl, you remember, who had lived with me before I married Messalina: it had amused me to teach her Etruscan while I was compiling my history of Etruria. Calpurnia had probably sent me the note in Etruscan not only because it would be unintelligible to anyone but myself, but because I would know that it really came from her. I asked Euodus: ‘Did you see the woman?’ He said that she looked like an Egyptian and had a pock-marked forehead but was otherwise very good-looking. I recognized this as Cleopatra, Calpurnia’s friend who shared the house with her.
I was due to go down to the docks immediately after the sacrifice and could not decently postpone the engagement: it would be thought that I was more interested in visiting a couple of prostitutes than in attending to Imperial business. Yet I knew that Calpurnia was not the sort of person to send me an idle message, and while I was sacrificing I decided that I must hear what she had to say at all costs. I would sham sick, perhaps. Fortunately the God Augustus came to my assistance: the entrails of the ram I now sacrificed to him were the most unpropitious ones I had ever seen. It had seemed a fine animal, too, but inside it was as rotten as an old cheese. It was plainly impossible for me to transact any public business on that day, particularly so serious a matter as the dedication of the largest granary in the world, as this was. So I excused myself and everyone agreed that my decision was a proper one. I went to my own villa and gave out that I would rest there for the remainder of the day, but would be glad to attend the banquet to which I had been invited that night, so long as it had no official character. I then sent my sedan-chair round to the back entrance of the villa and was soon being carried in it, with the curtains drawn, to Calpurnia’s pretty house on a hill just outside the town.
Calpurnia greeted me with a look of such anxious sorrow that I knew at once that something very serious had happened. ‘Tell me at once!’ I said. ‘What’s the matter?’
She began to cry. I had never seen Calpurnia cry before, except once on the famous occasion when I was sent for at midnight to the Palace by Caligula’s orders and she thought that I was going to my execution. She was a self-possessed girl with none of the tricks and manners of the ordinary prostitute and ‘as true as a Roman sword’, as the saying is. ‘You promise to listen? But you’ll not want to believe me. You’ll want to have me tortured and flogged. I don’t want to tell you, either. But nobody else dares tell you, so I must. I promised Narcissus and Pallas that I would. They were good friends to me in the old days when we were all poor together. They said that you’d not believe them, or anyone, but I said that I thought you’d believe me, because once I showed myself your true friend when you were in trouble. I gave you all my savings, didn’t I? I was never greedy or jealous or dishonest, was I?’
‘Calpurnia, in my life I have known only three really good women, and I’ll tell you their names. One was Cypros, a Jewish princess; one was old Briseis, my mother’s wardrobe-maid; and the third is you. Now tell me what you have to say’
‘You’ve left out Messalina.’
‘Messalina goes without saying. Very well, then, four really good women. And I don’t consider that I’m insulting Messalina by linking her with an Oriental princess, a Greek freedwoman, and a prostitute from Padua. The sort of goodness I mean isn’t the prerogative – –’
‘If you put Messalina in the list, leave me out,’ she said, gasping.
‘Modest, Calpurnia? You needn’t be. I mean what I say.’
‘No. Not modest.
‘Then I don’t understand.’
Calpurnia said, very slowly and pa
infully: ’T hate to hurt you, Claudius. But I mean this. I mean that if Cypros had been a typical princess of the Herod family – if she had been blood-thirsty and ambitious and unscrupulous and without any moral restraint; and if Briseis had been a typical wardrobe-maid – if she had been thieving and base-minded and lazy and clever at covering up her tracks; and if your Calpurnia had been a typical prostitute – if I had been vain, lustful, promiscuous, and greedy, and used my beauty as a means for dominating and ruining men – and if you were now listing the three worst types of women you knew and happened to pick on us as convenient examples –’
‘– Then what? What are you getting at? You talk so slowly.’
‘– Then, Claudius, you’d be right to add Messalina to us and to tell me, “Messalina goes without saying”.’
‘Am I mad, or are you?’
‘Not I.’
‘Then what do you mean? What’s my poor Messalina done to be suddenly attacked in this violent and extraordinary way? I don’t think that you and I are going to remain friends much longer, Calpurnia.’
‘You left town at seven o’clock this morning.’
‘Yes. And what of it?’
‘I left at ten. I had been up there with Cleopatra doing some shopping. I looked in at the wedding. A curious hour of the day for a wedding, wasn’t it? They were having a grand time. Every-one drunk. Marvellous show. The whole house decorated with vine-leaves and ivy and enormous bunches of grapes, and wine-vats, and wine-presses. The vintage festival, that was what it was supposed to represent.’
‘What wedding? Talk sense.’
‘Messalina’s wedding to Silius. Weren’t you invited? She was there dancing and waving a thyrsus in the biggest wine-vat she could find, dressed in a short wine-stained white tunic with one breast exposed and her hair flying loose. She was almost decent, though, compared with the other women. They only wore leopard-skins, because they were Bacchantes. Silius was Bacchus. He was crowned with ivy and wore buskins. He was even drunker than Messalina. He kept tossing his head about in time to the music and grinning like Baba.’
‘But… but…,’ I said stupidly. ‘The wedding isn’t until the tenth. I’m to officiate.’
‘They’re managing nicely without you. So I went to Narcissus at the Palace, and when he saw me, he said: “Thank God you’re here, Calpurnia. You’re the only one he’ll believe.” And Pallas ––’
‘I don’t believe. I refuse to believe.’
Calpurnia clapped her hands. ‘Cleopatra, Narcissus!’ They came in and fell at my feet. ‘It’s true about the wedding, isn’t it?’
They agreed that it was true.
‘But I know all about it,’ I said feebly. ‘It’s not a real wedding, my friends. It’s a sort of joke that Messalina and I planned. She’s not going to bed with him at the end of the ceremony. It’s all quite innocent.’
Narcissus said: ‘Silius caught at her and pulled up her tunic and began kissing her body in full view of the company, and she screamed and laughed and then he carried her off to the nuptial-chamber, and they stayed there nearly an hour before coming out again to do a little more drinking and dancing. That’s not innocent, Caesar, surely?’
Calpurnia said: ‘And unless you act at once, Silius will be master of Rome. Everyone I met told me that Messalina and Silius have sworn by their own heads to restore the Republic, and that they have the whole Senate behind them and most of the Guards.’
‘I must hear more,’ I said. ‘I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I don’t know whether to pour gold in your laps or flog you until the bones show.’
They told me more, but Narcissus would only speak on condition that I forgave him for hiding Messalina’s crimes from me so long. He said that when he was first aware of them and I seemed happy in my innocence, he had resolved to spare me the pain of disillusionment so long as Messalina did nothing which endangered my life or the safety of the country. He had hoped that she might mend her ways or else that I would find out about her for myself. But as time went on and her behaviour grew more and more shameless, it became more and more difficult to tell me. In fact, he could not believe that I did not know by now what all Rome, and all the provinces for that matter, and our enemies over the frontier, knew. In the course of nine years it seemed impossible that I should not have heard of her debaucheries, which were astounding in their impudence.
Cleopatra told me the most horrible and ludicrous story. During my absence in Britain Messalina had issued a challenge to the Prostitutes’ Guild asking them to provide a champion to contend with her at the Palace, and see which of the two would wear out most gallants in the course of a night. The Guild had sent a famous Sicilian named Scylla, after the whirlpool in the Straits of Messina. When dawn came Scylla had been forced to confess herself beaten at the twenty-fifth gallant but Messalina had continued, out of bravado, until the sun was quite high in the sky. And, what was worse, most of the nobility at Rome had been invited to attend the contest, and many of the men had taken part in it; and three or four of the women had been persuaded by Messalina to compete too.
I sat weeping with my head in my hands, just as Augustus had done some fifty years before, when his grandsons Gaius and Lucius told him the same sort of story about their mother Julia; and in Augustus’s very words I said that I had never heard the slightest whisper or entertained the faintest suspicion that Messalina was not the chastest woman in Rome. And like Augustus I had the impulse to shut myself away in a room and see nobody for days. But they would not let me. Two lines out of a musical comedy that Mnester’s company had played a few days before – I forget the name – kept hammering absurdly in my brain:
I know no sound so laughable, so laughable and sad,
As an old man weeping for his wife, a girl gone to the bad.
I said to Narcissus: ‘At the first Games I ever saw (I was acting as joint-President with my brother Germanicus) – Games in honour of my father, you know – I saw a Spanish sword-fighter have his shield-arm lopped off at the shoulder. He was close to me and I saw his face clearly. Such a stupid look when he saw what had happened. And the whole amphitheatre roared with laughter at him. I thought it was funny too, God forgive me.’
Chapter 29
THEN Xenophon came in and forced a drink between my lips, because I was on the point of collapse, and took me in hand generally. I don’t know exactly what decoction he gave me, but it had the effect of making me feel very clear-headed and self-possessed and utterly impersonal about everything. My feet seemed to be treading on clouds like a god. It also affected the focus of my eyes, so that I saw Narcissus and Calpurnia and Pallas as if they were standing twenty paces away instead of quite close.
‘Send for Turranius and Lusius Geta.’ Turranius was my Superintendent of Stores now that Callon was dead, and Geta, as I have told you, was the joint-Commander of the Guards with Crispinus.
I cross-examined them, after first assuring them that I would not punish them if they spoke the truth. They confirmed all that Narcissus and Calpurnia and Cleopatra had told me, and told me a lot more. When I asked Geta to explain frankly why he had failed to report all this to me before, he said: ‘May I quote a proverb, Caesar, that is often on your own lips: The knee is nearer than the shin? What happened to Justus, my predecessor, when he tried to let you know what was happening in your wife’s wing of the Palace?’
Turranius replied to the same question by reminding me that when recently he had summoned the courage to come to me with a complaint of the seizure of public stores at Messalina’s orders – basalt blocks imported from Egypt for the repaving of the Ox Market – for use, it turned out, in a new colonnade that she was building in the Gardens of Lucullus, I had grown angry and told him never again to question any act or order of hers, saying that nothing that she did was done except at my particular instance or at least with my full sanction. I had told him that if he ever again had any complaint to make against the Lady Messalina’s behaviour he was to make it to the Lady Messalina her
self. Turranius was right. I had actually said that.
Calpurnia, who had been fidgeting impatiently in the background while I was questioning Geta and Turranius, now caught my eye pleadingly. I understood that she wanted a word with me alone. I cleared the room at once and then she said gently and earnestly: ‘My dear, you won’t get anywhere by asking the same question over and over again from different people. It’s quite plain: they were all afraid to tell you, partly because they knew how much you loved and trusted Messalina, but mostly because you were Emperor. You have been very foolish and very unlucky and now you must do something to retrieve the position. If you don’t act at once you will be sentencing us all to death. Every minute counts. You must go at once to the Guards Camp and get the protection of all the loyal troops there. I can’t believe that they’ll desert you for Messalina’s and Silius’s sake. There may be one or two colonels or captains who have been bought over, but the rank and file are devoted to you. Send mounted messengers to Rome at once to announce that you are on your way to take vengeance on Silius and your wife. Send warrants for the arrest of everyone present at the wedding. That will probably be enough to smother the revolt. They’ll all be too drunk to do anything dangerous. But hurry!’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll hurry!’
I called in Narcissus again. ‘Do you trust Geta?’
‘To be honest, Caesar, I don’t altogether trust him.’
‘And the two captains he has with him here?’
‘I trust them, but they’re stupid.’
‘Crispinus is away on leave at Baiae, so whom shall we put in command of the Guards, if we can’t trust Geta?’
Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina Page 49